Quote

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Emile M. Cioran

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Emile M. Cioran
Represents
Obsession
Theory
Ideas
Much
People
Aggregate
Obsessions
Theories

More quotes by Emile M. Cioran

Image
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
The Holy Ghost, Luther instructs us, is not a skeptic. Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
Emile M. Cioran
Image
To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran